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Looser Rules on Illegal Housing Sought

After Rakha Sarkar and her husband spent thousands to upgrade the cellar apartment, they were ordered to dismantle it and pay $1,200.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Rakha and Mahbub Sarkar spent more than $4,000 upgrading the cellar apartment of their Queens home. They put in new floors and kitchen cabinets, and in the borough’s tight market for rentals under $1,000 a month, they had no problem finding new tenants.

But not long after the remodeling, city building inspectors swooped in. They made the tenants move out, they ordered the Sarkars to dismantle the rental unit and they imposed an initial penalty of $1,200.

The couple’s offense: an illegal conversion.

The Sarkars are still removing debris after taking down the kitchen and the wall that used to divide the studio-size space. “I had to wreck everything,” said Ms. Sarkar, 34, a stay-at-home mother who lives with her husband, a limousine driver, and their two children in the two-story home in Richmond Hill.

New York City’s Department of Buildings issues more than 4,400 violations a year for illegally converted basements, cellars and attics that cannot be occupied because of health and safety hazards, like poor ventilation or a lack of multiple exits.

But with the scarcity of affordable housing in the city and with many New Yorkers already living in makeshift apartments, some housing advocates are calling for a new approach. They want the city to legalize at least some of these units by waiving certain laws, as the Bloomberg administration did last year to test so-called micro-units. Smaller than the current 450-square-foot minimum for studios, such micro-units are planned for a Manhattan building scheduled to open in 2015 in a pilot project.

“Micro-units are the high-end version of the basement units,” said City Councilman Brad Lander, who said he was drafting legislation to create a new category for “accessory” dwelling units and specific zoning and building code standards for them. “There are a lot of units that are perfectly safe that can’t be made legal under current rules.”

The push for more flexibility is coming from elected officials, community groups and building industry professionals who say unauthorized units continue to flourish despite enforcement crackdowns because they meet pressing needs: they house lower-income tenants, they help homeowners pay mortgages and they accommodate some of the city’s growing population.

Relaxing the rules, though, can be a tough sell among neighbors who see illegal units as a drain on schools, hospitals, parking and other resources.

Photo

A workman heading to the former tenants’ space in Rakha and Mahbub Sarkar’s home in Queens.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

This year, legalization has made it onto the advocacy agenda of housing groups and the platform of the Democratic mayoral nominee, Bill de Blasio, who has singled out illegal basements and “granny flats” as possible additions to the city’s rent-regulated housing stock. Mr. de Blasio lived in a basement apartment in Astoria, Queens, in the 1980s but “can’t say for sure” whether it was legal, his campaign spokesman, Dan Levitan, said.

Largely written to prevent slum conditions and firetraps, New York’s housing regulations have not kept up with changing cultural norms and increasing financial pressures, some housing experts said. It is, for example, illegal for more than three unrelated adults to live together in New York City. That law is widely broken and infrequently enforced.

For many students and new immigrants, sharing space has long been the most affordable housing option in the city. New economic challenges, the experts said, have spurred even more demand for such arrangements.

“There are ways we can allow people to live in different kinds of configurations that would be cheaper for them,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a co-director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.

A 2008 study by two nonprofit groups — the Pratt Center for Community Development and the Chhaya Community Development Corporation — found the city’s illegal “accessory” units to be concentrated in immigrant neighborhoods of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, where they rented for as little as one-third below market rates. That study estimated the size of “the housing underground” — illegal basements, rooming houses, commercial lofts and other such dwellings — at more than 114,000 units.

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Advocates of legalizing some of these units — the ones that are safe or can be made safe by adding doors and windows and are not prone to flooding — are now focusing on those that could easily come into compliance if laws were more flexible or conversion rules and costs more manageable.

Additional housing stock could be created, for instance, by allowing conversions of cellars, which currently can never be rented or occupied. (Under the city’s regulations, the lowest level of a structure is a cellar if more than half the height is below curb level; if at least half of its height is above curb level, then it is considered a basement.)

For a couple from Bangladesh living in Queens, the legal status of their cellar rental in Hollis is of great consequence, said the wife, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to draw the attention of the authorities. A 30-year-old bank teller, she said they pay $750 a month, including utilities and Internet, for the space, which allows them to save for a full-fledged apartment. But because they have no lease, her husband, a software engineer who is applying for citizenship, has no proof of residency.

Photo

A city eviction notice was posted after the extra unit was declared illegal. The Department of Buildings issues more than 4,400 violations a year for illegally converted units.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

“We don’t have any legal anything,” she said.

Unlike cellars, basements in homes can be rented out when zoning permits, as long as they have a second way out and meet minimum requirements for air, light and sanitation, city officials said. But such conversions can cost around $15,000, and securing the necessary permits can take a long time, said Seema Agnani, the executive director of Chhaya.

The group is lobbying city officials for a pilot program to test conversions of both cellars and basements. That would include financial incentives, like low-cost loans; a property tax abatement; and free engineering assistance to examine and improve conditions. It also seeks to have the units designated as rent-regulated to maintain them affordable.

Buildings Department officials said they received 18,126 complaints about illegal units last year, and the Queens borough president, Helen M. Marshall, said she had not heard a lot of support for the legalization effort.

“What we do hear is complaints about excessive number of residents in illegal and unsafe dwellings, multiple electrical boxes that indicate the structure is not being used legally, excessive garbage buildup and the danger of fire,” Ms. Marshall said.

But advocates of legalization say the point is to deal with an existing problem and allow better city planning. “We want a path to legalization,” said Jerilyn Perine, executive director of the research group Citizens Housing and Planning Council and a former city housing commissioner. “Not every unit should be legalized, but there are some that could.”

For owners and tenants, the advantage is not having their lives upended.

The Sarkars bought their house eight years ago with tenants already in the cellar, and initially they thought the setup was legal. But after raiding the home, the Buildings Department told the couple their cellar was approved only for the boiler, storage or a recreation room.

Now, the Sarkars are struggling without the $800 a month they formerly took in from tenants, the husband, Mahbub Sarkar, said.

“If we don’t get the rent, we can’t pay the mortgage,” he said. The couple has pondered selling the house, Ms. Sarkar said, “but we put everything new in this house.”

“We spent a lot of time talking about how to fix this house,” she said. “If we were to leave, it’d be really heartbreaking.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 14, 2013, on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Looser Rules on Illegal Housing Sought. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe